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Last month, we all had to bury our heads in the sand in the face of a Lancet report that revealed the safe amount of alcohol to drink is… none at all. Because you can forget that, obviously. Ditto the advice from Dame Sally Davies, England’s Chief Medical Officer, cautioning women to think of the risk of breast cancer every time they reach for a glass of wine. No thanks.

Still, I’m not proud to admit that I felt a combination of panicked and bereft last week at the realisation that it was time for the summer party – by which I mean lunchtime rosé on holiday, gin and tonics most evenings, prosecco at home in the garden because, hey, why not? – to come to an end. I found myself questioning if I could actually enjoy myself without an aperitivo in my hand, or a glass of wine over supper with my husband. (For the record it was actually a colossal relief: I slept like a baby for the first time in weeks).

Last month, we all had to bury our heads in the sand in the face of a Lancet report that revealed the safe amount of alcohol to drink is… none at all. Because you can forget that, obviously. Ditto the advice from Dame Sally Davies, England’s Chief Medical Officer, cautioning women to think of the risk of breast cancer every time they reach for a glass of wine. No thanks.

Still, I’m not proud to admit that I felt a combination of panicked and bereft last week at the realisation that it was time for the summer party – by which I mean lunchtime rosé on holiday, gin and tonics most evenings, prosecco at home in the garden because, hey, why not? – to come to an end. I found myself questioning if I could actually enjoy myself without an aperitivo in my hand, or a glass of wine over supper with my husband. (For the record it was actually a colossal relief: I slept like a baby for the first time in weeks).

Throughout my life, my drinking habits have vacillated between extremes, with very few periods of moderation. As a teenager drinking illicitly, I didn’t model myself on my parents, who had wine with supper some evenings, but never to excess. No, our unsophisticated (and underage) goal was to get roaring drunk, whether via snakebite and black at the pub, or vodka orange on a park bench. By the time I was in my 20s, binge-drinking was the norm: ladette culture was at a peak and my friends, both male and female, would frequently down five or six pints a night.

After university, I got a job at the New York Times, working shifts that ended at 1am – at which point my colleagues decamped to the local dive bar in Times Square. In New York, bartenders pour freehand and and I’d often get home at 4am, gin-soaked and without a care in the world. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that drinking might be bad for my health.

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Back in London, a few years later, I stopped drinking completely for 18 months, after I was diagnosed with colitis, a digestive disorder. I genuinely wondered if I’d be able to do it, but my memory of that time is that I have never felt brighter, healthier or happier. I went to parties and sank nothing but fizzy water, and left feeling I’d had a better time for being sober.

Still, I started drinking again and here I am in my 40s, marvelling that I was ever teetotal. I partly blame parenthood. There’s no doubt that the change of pace imposed by having a small person, plus suddenly being house-bound, means you have to make your own fun. The baby’s finally asleep? Crack open a bottle. Can’t go out? Invite friends over for ‘baby cocktail hour’. I know it’s immature to equate booze with fun, but part of me still can’t imagine Friday night without the pop of a cork.

This habitual drinking is one of the hazards of being older and more settled: in my twenties, everything was erratic, including my drinking habits. Now, it’s so embedded in the routine, you can’t imagine life without it.

That’s one reason I still like to stop completely every so often. Over the years, like so many of us, I’ve dabbled with various ways to drink less. Dry January? Tick. Spirits? Not any more. And, with the revelation that parties can actually be more fun (and less embarrassing the next day) without drinking I often drive, thus removing it from the equation. Still, I frequently exceed the ever-changing advice and guidelines about what’s safe, and so do most people I know.

Last January, I went to see hypnotist Georgia Foster for this newspaper, to try and cultivate a ‘drinking less mind set’. Reading her book, Drink less in 7 days, I realised that I’m probably what she calls a ‘perfectionist’. Perfectionists usually have alcohol-free days, because abstaining is easier than moderation, but come the weekend, moderation is out the window. (‘Pleasers’, meanwhile, are more inclined to drink because of peer pressure).

Hypnosis was helpful, largely because it taught me to analyse my emotional state to avoid drinking for the wrong reasons (to quell my ‘inner critic’, or anxiety). The net result of my session, though, was that I actually started drinking with less guilt and, so, more abandon. Hearing Georgia detail the extreme habits of some drinkers who seek her help, I felt vindicated about my relatively moderate habits. I was also influenced by her revelation that Government guidelines of what’s safe are an under-estimation, based on the logic that people tend to lie about how much they drink.

So it backfired a bit. But, now that summer is over, I will be embracing our new collective goal of two consecutive dry days a week. In fact I think I’ll aim for four.

Max Davidson: 'To my daughters' generation, the gym is almost as important as the pub'

As a middle-aged, middle-class drinker who has never been in a pub brawl in his life, but would certainly drink more glasses of wine a week than medical guidelines would recommend, I have become all but immune to lectures from the satraps of the nanny state.

When the lectures come from my twenty- and thirtysomething daughters, both doctors, however, I take them to heart and, over the last few years, have cut down on my drinking to an extent. Three or four large glasses of wine in an evening have dwindled to two or three glasses – occasionally, no wine at all.

'I have become all but immune to lectures from the satraps of the nanny state'
Credit: John Lawrence

To my daughters’ generation, for whom the gym has become almost as important as the pub, I must sometimes seem like a throwback to an age of decadence. But baby-boomers like me have never really been true decadents. We have just been lucky. In an age where alcohol is far more widely available, and at much lower cost, than it was for our parents, it is hardly surprising that so many of us have chosen to take advantage and let the good times roll.

In the 1950s, when I was born, memories of rationing were still fresh, and that natural abstemiousness coloured the way my parents and their friends approached alcohol. Wine was an occasional treat rather than a daily habit. I must have been a teenager before I saw my father with a whisky. Visits to pubs and restaurants were very infrequent indeed. Licensing hours were strict. The kind of alcoholic free-for-all you now see in town centres on a Saturday night would have been unimaginable.

The results of the free-for-all are not always edifying, and at the point when public drunkenness becomes a threat to good order, the government needs to intervene. But the moral disapproval with which drinking so often gets discussed is becoming increasingly oppressive.

I have recently been blessed with a grandson and posted a picture on social media of myself with the newborn in one hand and a pint of bitter in the other, under the caption “I’ve got my hands full at the moment!” It was meant as a joke, obviously, but I was astonished how many of my friends didn't approve.

There is definitely a more censorious attitude to alcohol than there was 20 years ago. If that leads to more people living longer, perhaps that is no bad thing, but where is the recognition that quality of life is as important as quantity and that, for millions of people, myself included, some of the happiest, most life-enhancing experiences of our lives have been spent with a glass of something stronger than an orange juice in hand?

Bryony Gordon: 'If you feel you might have an alcohol problem, you probably do'

One of the questions I am most often asked in my new life as a sober person – other than, “is it really hard?” (yes, but no harder than a particularly nasty hangover) – is “how did you know that you had a problem?”.

This is a good question, because for a long time I didn’t know I had a problem – I just felt, perhaps, possibly, maybe that I had one. I had an inkling that the way I knocked back booze was not normal. But I mostly chose to ignore it, and surround myself with other people who felt perhaps, possibly, maybe that they had a bit of a problem. It’s all about context, you see. If I only hung out with teetotal vegans, then I had a problem. If all my friends liked nothing more than soaking themselves in red wine, then I didn’t.

About ten years ago, a colleague suggested to me that perhaps, possibly, maybe I was an alcoholic. Well he should know – he was one himself. I was outraged. How dare he? What was wrong with drinking your monthly alcohol allowance in a week (or a couple of days)? I was in my 20s! Everybody got so drunk on a Tuesday night that they ended up snogging a stranger on a street corner and having to be reminded about it by their flatmate? And then,when I got a bit older… well didn’t everyone with children pop open the wine the moment they went to sleep?

'I had an inkling that the way I knocked back booze was not normal. But I mostly chose to ignore it'
Credit: Andrew Crowley

I never drank in the day. I didn’t drink every day. I didn’t touch spirits. I never sat by myself on a park bench with a miniature. But I felt dreadful all the time, and alcohol dominated my thoughts even when I wasn’t drinking it. One of the first things I learnt in rehab was that it doesn’t matter how much you drink – it’s how you drink it.

Do you feel powerless over alcohol, and that your life has become unmanageable? Admitting that’s the first step in AA, by the way. But an easier way to work out if you have a problem is this. Do you feel like you have a problem? Then you probably do. Try not drinking for 90 days. Booze will still be there at the end. And if you can’t do that then you should perhaps, possibly, definitely seek professional help.